Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of September 30

However, the Palestinian Civil Defence authority said a Palestinian man was killed when he was hit by a falling missile fragment in the West Bank city of Jericho.

It’s ironic (or emblematic?) that the only confirmed casualty from Iran’s retaliatory strike was a Palestinian citizen.

Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah (Washington Post)

It’s mostly a recap, but here are the bits that seemed to be new:

The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.

…

The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications.

For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive. In an irony that would not become clear for many months, Hezbollah would end up indirectly paying the Israelis for the tiny bombs that would kill or wound many of its operatives.

…

The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924.

“She was the one in touch with Hezbollah, and explained to them why the bigger pager with the larger battery was better than the original model,” said an Israeli official briefed on details of the operation. One of the main selling points about the AR924 was that it was “possible to charge with a cable. And the batteries were longer lasting,” the official said.

…

Most top elected officials in Israel were unaware of the capability until Sept. 12. That’s the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned his intelligence advisers for a meeting to discuss potential action against Hezbollah, Israeli officials said.

…

Intelligence officials also talked about a long-held anxiety: With the escalating crisis in southern Lebanon, there was a growing risk the explosives would be discovered. Years of careful planning and deception could quickly come to naught.

Across Israel’s security establishment, an intense debate erupted, officials said. Everyone, including Netanyahu, recognized that the thousands of exploding pagers could do untold damage to Hezbollah, but could also trigger a fierce response, including a massive retaliatory missile strike by surviving Hezbollah leaders, with Iran possibly joining in the fray.

An odd one here, Yazidi woman freed by US (Israel?) after operation in gaza.

Hamas doesn't even like ISIS, I'm guessing this must have been hidden completely from the public view for it to be happening for 10 years on a single person, And in gaza of all places. Some other sources seem to say she was held captive by Hamas, but I'm unsure. I did see this on reddit and people went into the 'well they're gazan so they do that all the time' type stereotype so...

EDIT: It seems like other articles have additional details which are not mentioned by the Reuters article at all. Hmm...

As war and religion rages, Israel’s secular elite contemplate a ‘silent departure’ | The Guardian

“There is a growing problem of ‘brain drain’, and it will increase, firstly, if the military risk is not reduced and, secondly, if the state does indeed turn more populist-autocratic,” said Ram, who has researched the struggle for Israel’s future between liberal, mostly secular Israelis like Noam and a group he describes as ethno-religious traditionalists.

How the U.S. Worked Overtime to Deliver Weapons to Israel. This one has too many lines to highlights, I'd practically be posting the whole article here, so instead I'm just gonna leave the link.

This is a Twitter thread from Reuters' deputy US foreign policy editor. I'm pasting it in full below:

SCOOP: I reviewed three sets of internal email exchanges between senior Biden administration officials who were warned just DAYS after Oct. 7 that Israel was risking committing war crimes by ordering more than a million Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate. There’s more: 1/X

The email exchanges, which take place between Oct. 11-14 and involve senior White House, State Dept & Pentagon officials, including Biden’s top Mideast aide Brett McGurk, provide rare insight into the thinking of the U.S. government in the early days of the Gaza war 2/X

The emails are striking even after almost a year — because the “humanitarian catastrophe” that the U.S. officials are warned of at the time has materialized: 40,000 people killed, Gaza reduced to a wasteland, children starved and the region still on the brink of a wider war. 3/X

The emails, which haven’t been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world. 4/X

The messages also show how the White House resisted calls for a ceasefire in those early days and the internal pressure in the Biden administration to shift its messaging to including sympathy for the Palestinians. Many more details here: 5/X https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/emails-show-early-us-concerns-over-gaza-offensive-risk-israeli-war-crimes-2024-10-04/

It started on Oct. 11, when the State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, in an email told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis. 6/X

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote. 7/X

The State Department’s top Middle East diplomat, Barbara Leaf, forwarded Russo’s email to White House officials McGurk. She warned that the relationship with Washington’s “otherwise would-be stalwart” Arab partners was at risk due to the kinds of concerns raised by Russo. 8/X

McGurk replied that if the question was whether the administration should call for a ceasefire, the answer was “No.” He added, however, that Washington was “100 pct” in favor of supporting humanitarian corridors and protecting civilians. 9/X

On Oct. 13, Dana Stroul, then a top Middle East official at the Pentagon, relayed to the White House a blunt warning from the ICRC that Israel’s mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law. 10/X

“ICRC is not ready to say this in public, but is raising private alarm that Israel is close to committing war crimes," Stroul said in her email addressing senior WH, State and Pentagon officials. She added that the ICRC’s assessment had left her “chilled to the bone.” 11/X

Replying to Stroul, McGurk likened the situation to the U.S.-led military operation against ISIS militants in Mosul in 2016, an assault that left the Iraqi city in ruins. He said the military and humanitarian strategy in the Mosul assault had been planned hand in hand. 12/X

Two officials on the email chain replied that it would be impossible to put in place the necessary infrastructure with so little time. One reminded McGurk that the Mosul operation was the result of much longer planning. 13/X

“Our assessment is that there’s simply no way to have this scale of a displacement without creating a humanitarian catastrophe,” Paula Tufro, a senior White House official in charge of humanitarian response, wrote in the email. 14/X

It would take “months” to get structures in place to provide “basic services” to more than a million people, Tufro said & asked that the White House tell Israel to slow its offensive. “We need GOI (Government of Israel) to pump the brakes in pushing people south,” she wrote. 15/X

Andrew Miller, then a senior official at the State Dept, urged his colleagues to act fast.

“If we’re inclined to weigh in with the Israelis to dissuade them from seeking mass evacuations, we will have to do it soon, at a high level and at multiple touch points,” he wrote. 16/X

I don't mean to restart discussion of it (the lock was justified, I feel), but is this still being considered? It's been a while.